Reviewed by: Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms and the Queer Middle Agesby Tison Pugh Kathryn L. Lynch tison pugh, Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms and the Queer Middle Ages. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2014. Pp. 242. isbn: 978–0–8142–1264–6. $64.95 (cloth). isbn: 978–0–8142–7319–7. $64.95 (ebook). isbn: 978–0–8142–9368–3. $14.95 (CD). Chaucer’s mastery of bawdy humor did not prevent his poetry from also reaching heights of transcendent romantic lyricism and devotional poignancy, and Chaucer criticism is not lacking in analysis of either register. Tison Pugh, however, brings something new to the mix by identifying ‘anti-eroticism’ as the ground that brings meaning and sharpness to the poet’s representations of carnal exchange and physical love; erotic and ‘anti-erotic’ become categories that are intertwined rather than opposites. After an introduction that lays out the framework of this anti-erotic ‘queering’ of Chaucer’s oeuvre, Pugh turns in chapter two to the impossibility of Dorigen’s role as courtly beloved in the Franklin’s Tale. Not only is her presence mostly gratuitous, designed to enable a homosocial rivalry between Aurelius and Arveragus, but also, fulfillment in this tale is masochistic, inhabiting places of sacrifice rather than of success. In the end, the climax of the story becomes a set of affairs that do not take place and whose pleasures are deeply ‘anti-erotic.’ In chapter three, Pugh turns to the possibility of male friendship as confirmed through oaths of brotherhood in five disparate narratives: The House of Fame, the Knight’s Tale, the Friar’s Tale, the Pardoner’s Tale, and the Shipman’s Tale. The male/male relationships pledged through these oaths bear clear homoerotic potential, but they are ‘queer’ in other ways as well. For example, to the extent that Palamon and Arcite honor chivalric brotherhood, they are cut off from heterosexual love and marriage. In tales told by and about the lower classes, oaths of brotherhood also underscore the empty social pretensions of Chaucer’s churls. In all cases, brotherhood promises are never powerful enough to contain the unruly libidinal energies that animate them, and they frequently devolve into blatant hypocrisy. Chapter four explores the ‘necrotic erotics in Chaucerian romance’ in the Knight’s Taleand Troilus and Criseyde. The pursuit of a woman like Emelye or Criseyde who has no interest in hetero-erotic love amounts to a courtship [End Page 148]of one’s own death. Indeed, death-like imagery haunts the women in these stories, who are conquered or traded in war and reject productive childbearing, as well as the men, who experience falling in love as a kind of painful death, foreshadowing the actual deaths of male lovers in both poems. But children themselves do not guarantee survival or defeat death, as we learn in chapter five. Families with children are also ‘queered,’ by the iron hand of paternal authority. In a comic register, the Miller Symkyn (in the Reeve’s Tale) trades his erotic interest in his wife and his parental concern for his daughter for money and social status. A similar displacement of erotic and affective value also governs the Summoner’s Tale, where the fact of a dead child proves no match for the Friar’s discourtesy and implacable need to press forward into the ailing Thomas’ queered anal ‘pryvetee.’ Children are reduced to pawns of maternal torture and child abduction in the Clerk’s Tale, and in the Physician’s Taleof Virginia, a father’s need to preserve his paternal honor causes him to sacrifice his bloodline. The role of father is here revealed as doomed to seek its own destruction within a system that, failing to acknowledge a child’s autonomy or subjectivity, cruelly binds her within the prison of the family. Pugh’s discussion of children rounds out his exploration of the anti-erotic ‘queering’ of human families and societies. In chapter six and in the epilogue, he explores the borderlines between the human and the divine and between the human and the animal. In The Legend of Good Women, in the Wife of Bath’s...